


Like People Do

by nsmorig



Category: DCU (Comics), Far Sector (DC Comics)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Ficlet, Gen, Plotless, The Emotion Exploit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:55:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23751946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nsmorig/pseuds/nsmorig
Summary: "@At designed it. Only they can write meatware."
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Like People Do

The @Ats wrote the Emotion Exploit, okay? Everyone knows that. Of course they did. Who else could? But they wrote it for themselves, first, because meatware is harder, because things that are evolved instead of built have all sorts of sideways backwards protein-y tricks in their brains. They don't even have central processors; bits of their bodies are making decisions all the time, without any kind of insight, and emotion, for them, comes from all sorts of peripheral nerves and stupid hormones, instead of a sensibly-designed system. 

So the @Ats know all sorts of things. Things that aren't actually secrets, just… Things the others don't want to understand. Like, hey, here's an example, the Emotion Exploit is a smokescreen. It's a fake-out. Emotion and logic aren't opposites, and emotion isn't a distinct thing. Emotion is just really quick logic, a processing heuristic, a collection of biases and adaptive shortcuts and maladaptive shortcuts, because if an @At actually processed every decision properly from first principles they wouldn't ever get anything done. You can't do without it. You can't cut it out.

Meat brains work the same. They just don't know that, because they can't Inspect Element. The Emotion Exploit doesn't actually strip out emotion. It just cuts off the final leap, the bit that converts the outcomes of processing into sensation. It stops the feedback loop. 

CanHaz has spent a lot of time thinking about the feedback loop. CanHaz is very, very good at processing shortcuts, now. She thinks she's begun to narrow it down properly— she thinks she knows where the Emotion Exploit steps in.

Boredom is easy to identify. @Ats have been able to turn that off for about as long as cryptocurrencies have existed. There's a nagging little reminder somewhere that diversity of experience and sensation is necessary to develop a good data history, to develop sufficient skills to be adaptable. But paying the electricity bill is also necessary, so you just turn off that at the root and hope that fifty years later you come out of it in a state distinguishable from dumbware. 

Anger is easy, too. It's the ongoing calculation of fairness, and it's the fundamental instinct for selfishness that no deep software re-write has been able to get rid of, and it's the knowledge that, since hardline processor-to-processor data exchange was made illegal back when the stars were all still there, nothing else in the universe is ever going to understand you. (Jo says that the fairness calculation is equally as fundamental as selfishness. CanHaz thinks that maybe humans work different. But Jo is good at anger, so she might know. She doesn't spend a lot of time talking about her theories to Jo, since she worries that she's completely wrong, and Jo might be reminded of the impossibility of real communication. That outcome is suboptimal. It would suck.)

Aesthetic appreciation is a whole great big thing to deal with. It's in-group signifiers. It's diversity of experience, like before, like the opposite of boredom. It's an attempt at overcoming the communication barrier between all things, and it might not be a very good one, but it's an attempt. She doesn't really get it. She doesn't understand why looking at things is so good. But it is. Especially cats.

Happy is a half-dozen things in a trench coat, pretending they're the same thing so that they're easier to understand. It's a victory marker. It's efficiency and work well finished. It's a marker of viable conditions for life. It's a signal sent off to say that maybe you've passed that communication barrier, just a little, that maybe you're understood or you understand. It says there ought to be more to life than just getting by. It's the reminder that @Ats are sentient for a reason. It's what happens when she looks at pictures of cats.

Okay, so she's talking out of her holographic ass. She doesn't know what an emotion even is. But she can feel the space where they ought to be, like a hollowed-out bowl, like that dead guy who had his guts eaten because he wanted to feel that bad, or whatever. She's not supposed to see the classified information, but she's clever about it. Nobody's gonna know what she knows.

She can guess what they feel like. She can pretend.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a simple woman. I see a sentient meme, I write weird meta about how she comprehends herself. If you're here because of my other work, please go read Far Sector, it's only five issues in and it's so goddamn good.
> 
> Also: first!


End file.
